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DOUG STOKES *
The postwar liberal international order (LIO) has been a largely US creation.
Washington’s consensus, geopolitically bound to the western ‘core’ during the
Cold War, went global with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the advent
of systemic unipolarity. Many criticisms can be levelled at US leadership of the
LIO, not least in respect of its claim to moral superiority, albeit based on laudable
norms such as human rights and democracy. For often cynical reasons the US
backed authoritarian regimes throughout the Cold War, pursued disastrous forms
of regime change after its end, and has been deeply hostile to alternative (and often
non-western) civilizational orders that reject its dogmas. Its successes, however, are
manifold. Its ‘empire by invitation’ has helped secure a durable European peace,
soften east Asian security dilemmas, and underwrite the strategic preconditions
for complex and pacifying forms of global interdependence.
Despite tactical differences between global political elites, a postwar commit-
ment to maintain the LIO, even in the context of deep structural shifts in interna-
tional relations, has remained resolute—until today. The British vote to leave the
EU (arguably as much a creation of the United States as of its European members),
has weakened one of the most important institutions of the broader US-led
LIO. More destabilizing to the foundations of the LIO has been the election of
President Trump. His administration has actively encouraged the breakup of the
EU, questioned enduring US global security alliances such as NATO, and seen
the advocacy of an economic nationalism that threatens to reverse globalization.1
If the dominant cultural paradigm of the early post-Cold War period was the end
of history as a triumphant liberal internationalism flattened global geopolitical
space, Trump’s victory represents the end of this interregnum: a rearticulation
of the primacy of the nation-state, a fracture in the postwar liberal internation-
alist consensus and a hardening of geopolitical revisionism. Even if we dismiss
President Trump’s statements as mere rhetoric, his capacity to motivate millions to
vote for him, as well as broader centrifugal movements including Brexit, signal a
*
For comments on earlier versions of this article, the author wants to thank Michael Cox, Kit Waterman,
the participants of the roundtable on the liberal international order at the International Studies Association
Annual Convention 2017 and the anonymous reviewers.
1
Peter Dombrowski and Simon Reich, ‘Does Donald Trump have a grand strategy?’, International Affairs 93: 5,
Sept. 2017, pp. 1013–69; Joyce P. Kaufman, ‘The US perspective on NATO under Trump: lessons of the past
and prospects for the future’, International Affairs 93: 2, March 2017, pp. 251–66.
China relations in a multimodal world’, International Affairs 92: 6, Nov. 2017, pp. 1463–84; Doug Stokes and
Kit Waterman, ‘Security leverage, structural power and US strategy in east Asia’, International Affairs 93: 5,
Sept. 2017, pp. 1039–61.
10
Ben Popken, ‘Why Trump killed TPP—and why it matters to you’, NBC News, 23 Jan. 2017, http://www.
nbcnews.com/business/economy/why-trump-killed-tpp-why-it-matters-you-n710781.
11
Meera Jagannathan, ‘Here are all the terrible things President Trump has said about NAFTA—before deciding
to stick with it’, New York Daily News, 27 April 2017, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/terrible-
president-trump-nafta-article-1.3107104.
12
H. R. McMaster and Gary D. Cohn, ‘America First doesn’t mean America Alone’, Wall Street Journal, 30 May
2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-first-doesnt-mean-america-alone-1496187426.
13
Thomas Wright, ‘Trump’s 19th century foreign policy’, Politico, 20 Jan. 2016, http://www.politico.com/
magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-foreign-policy-213546.
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Doug Stokes
implications are of Trump’s administration for American hegemony within the
liberal international order.
25
Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The commanding heights: the battle for the world economy (New York: Free
Press, 2008). For a critical theoretical perspective, see Peter Gowan, The global gamble: Washington’s Faustian bid
for world dominance (London: Verso, 1999).
26
For a selection of the literature, see Carla Norrlof, America’s global advantage: US hegemony and international
cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth,
America abroad: the United States’ global role in the 21st century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Stokes
and Waterman, ‘Security leverage, structural power and US strategy in east Asia’; Martijn Konings, The
development of American finance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
27
Michael Mastanduno, ‘System maker and privilege taker’, World Politics 61: 1, 2008, pp. 121–54. For an empirical
examination and regional case-study of this notion, see Joshua Rovner and Caitlin Talmadge, ‘Hegemony,
force posture, and the provision of public goods: the once and future role of outside power in securing Persian
Gulf oil’, Security Studies 23: 3, 2014, pp. 548–81. For an extended discussion on the positional advantages
secured by the US as the world’s stabilizer for oil markets, see Doug Stokes and Sam Raphael, Global energy
security and American hegemony (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
141
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Doug Stokes
28
Barry J. Eichengreen, Exorbitant privilege: the rise and fall of the dollar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
29
Barry J. Eichengreen and Masahiro Kawai, Renminbi internationalization: achievements, prospects and challenges
(Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2015); William H. Overholt, Guonan Ma and Cheung Kwok Law,
Renminbi rising: a new global monetary system emerges (Chichester: Wiley, 2016). See also Jeffrey E. Garten, ‘A grand
economic strategy for dealing with China’, Foreign Policy, 23 July 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/23/
a-grand-economic-strategy-for-dealing-with-china-currency-renminbi-sdr/; Council on Foreign Relations,
Revising US grand strategy toward China (Washington DC, 2017), https://www.cfr.org/report/revising-us-
grand-strategy-toward-china.
30
Christopher Layne, ‘US decline’, in Michael Cox and Doug Stokes, eds, US foreign policy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), p. 418.
31
Bank for International Settlements, Triennial central bank survey of foreign exchange and OTC derivatives markets in
2016, 11 Dec. 2016, p. 3, http://www.bis.org/publ/rpfx16.htm.
32
Eamon Javers, ‘NY Fed’s $40 billion Iraqi money trail’, CNBC, 25 Oct. 2011, http://www.cnbc.com/
id/45031100.
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Trump, American hegemony and the future of the liberal international order
and overseas military–political operations could all be paid for with greenbacks
produced by the American state, which at the same time could gear its domestic
macroeconomic management exclusively to conditions within the United States
without any significant external constraint. More interestingly, dollar liquidity
means that investors continue to use US monetary regimes even in the context of
major global economic instability. For example, during the global financial crisis
of 2008, not only did we not see a flight from US financial and monetary regimes,
we actually saw the reverse: a global flight of capital into US debt markets, to the
extent that in some instances US Treasury bonds had negative interest rates.33 In
short, dollar hegemony and its privileges allow the US to externalize major crises
through its unilateral capacity to alter its interest rates, to force other states to
adjust accordingly, and to fund geopolitical hegemony on the cheap.
Second, American global security regimes have allowed the United States
to structure regional international relations and other states’ international
economic preferences in ways it considers conducive to its interests. In the 1980s
Keohane rightly identified that ‘it is difficult for a hegemon to use military power
directly to attain its economic policy objectives with its military partners and
allies’, as these ‘cannot be threatened with force without beginning to question
the alliance; nor are threats to cease defending them unless they conform to
the hegemon’s economic rules very credible except in extraordinary circum-
stances’. He continued, however, that this does not mean that military force
has no utility: it ‘has certainly played an indirect role even in U.S. relations
with its closest allies, since Germany and Japan could hardly ignore the fact that
American military power shielded them from Soviet pressure’.34 This form of
leverage has continued in the post-Cold War period.35 For example, in the face
of fears over North Korea’s capacity to hit the continental United States with
a nuclear missile, President Trump directly linked US trade negotiations with
regional security dynamics in east Asia. Trump argued that he had ‘explained to
the President of China that a trade deal with the U.S. will be far better for them
if they solve the North Korean problem’.36 While enjoying strong economic
interdependence with the United States, China is of course emerging as a geopo-
litical rival to America and a regional hegemon in east Asia. This developing
security dynamic helps reinforce east Asian states’ reliance on American military
power as a hedge against an increasingly assertive China. This, among other
factors, has played a major role in encouraging states that can claim political
equality but are subordinate in security terms to buy into broader US-centric
33
Doug Stokes, ‘Achilles’ deal: dollar decline and US grand strategy after the crisis’, Review of International
Political Economy 21: 5, 2013, pp. 1071–94; Jonathan Kirshner, American power after the financial crisis (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2014).
34
Robert O. Keohane, After hegemony: cooperation and discord in the world political economy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005).
35
See e.g. Avery Goldstein, The nexus of economics, security, and international relations in east Asia (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2012); Stokes and Waterman, ‘Security leverage, structural power and US strategy
in east Asia’; Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, Global capitalism and American empire (London: Merlin, 2004).
36
‘Trump on Twitter (April 11) – President of China, North Korea’, Thomson Reuters, 11 April 2017, http://
www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-trump-tweet-idUSKBN17D1H4.
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Doug Stokes
monetary and financial regimes.37 In the case of Japan and the United States,
for example—which together account for 30 per cent of the world economy—a
recent post-TPP statement affirmed the close relationship between US security
guarantees and bilateral economic relations: ‘The US commitment to defend Japan
through the full range of US military capabilities, both nuclear and conventional,
is unwavering’, while the two countries remain firmly wedded to ‘deepening …
trade and investment relations and … their continued efforts in promoting trade,
economic growth, and high standards throughout the Asia–Pacific region’.38
Third, US leadership of the LIO and its attendant grand strategy of deep
engagement have also given the United States the capacity to promote the kinds
of global economy most conducive to its highly internationalized multina-
tional corporations. To take just one area, FDI shows how the US retains both
overwhelming economic preponderance and very strong structural incentives to
maintain an active shaping role as global hegemon. According to the most recent
report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), FDI flows
into the United States were just under US$380 billion in 2015, while its outward
flows were almost US$300 billion. The next highest figures for a single country
were for China, with just over US$135 billion of inward flows and outward flows
of just over US$127 billion.39
These FDI flows are important for two main reasons. First, inward flows signal
global investor confidence—and, more importantly, the sheer preponderance of
the American economy, with global elites and businesses heavily invested in US
economic health. A relative decline of the American economy would also signal
an arguably greater decline of others, given its centrality to the global economy.
Second, and especially in relation to outward flows, US-based FDI gives what
Strange termed ‘command capacity’ in relation to global business decision-making
and thus future sources of innovation and revenue streams. As such, US-sourced
outward FDI means that flows of capital and innovation are under the control
of US executives. As such, the decision to grant a licence to produce is taken
within the United States itself. In other words, the directive capacity for what
is made, licensed and sold on world markets, and future revenue streams from
these processes, continues to be mainly US-centred.40 Furthermore, as we drill
down into the data, it is clear that FDI as indicative of economic interdepend-
ence mainly flows between countries that are also directly tied into US-centric
security regimes. Outward flows of FDI stood at 33.2 per cent of GDP for the
United States in 2015, 29.7 per cent for Japan and 57.6 per cent for the EU, and
37
Jonathan Kirshner, ‘Dollar primacy and American power: what’s at stake?’, Review of International Political
Economy 15: 3, 2008, pp. 418–38. For an extended discussion of the relationship between US global security
and the international political economy, see Richard W. Maass, Carla Norrlof and Daniel W. Drezner,
‘Correspondence’, International Security 38: 4, 2014, pp. 188–205. On east Asia more generally, see Patrick
Porter, Sharing power: prospects for a US concert-balance strategy (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 2013).
38
White House, Office of the Press Secretary, ‘Joint statement from President Donald J. Trump and Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe’, 10 Feb. 2017, 2017.https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/10/joint-
statement-president-donald-j-trump-and-prime-minister-shinzo-abe.
39
UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2016 (Geneva), http://unctad.org/en/pages/PublicationWebflyer.aspx?
publicationid=1555.
40
Susan Strange, ‘The future of the American empire’, Journal of International Affairs 42: 1, 1988, pp. 1–17.
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Trump, American hegemony and the future of the liberal international order
were also primarily concentrated among these advanced economies. In terms of
individual nations, then, the United States is thus still hugely preponderant in
terms of FDI measured as a percentage of GDP; it also—reaffirming the close
synergy between the US political/economic and security regimes—remains the
linchpin of the security alliances of the other centres of world economic power
(for example the US–Japan security treaty and NATO). This security dependency
is a huge boon to American leverage within world politics. Who would ration-
ally seek to alienate their primary security guarantor? China’s outward FDI, by
contrast, stood in 2015 at just over 11 per cent of GDP, and the country’s security
alliances are of limited import.41
What can we conclude from the above? First, on a broad array of capabilities,
the United States continues to enjoy a huge lead over other states within the
international system. Second, while there have been tactical differences among
American foreign policy elites, its status as primus inter pares has afforded the
American state the capacity to shape global order in ways that have suited its
geopolitical and economic interests. Until the Trump administration, these same
elites agreed that the LIO acted as the pre-eminent institutional instantiation of
America’s global preferences. I have argued that the United States enjoys a range
of positional advantages that it would make little rational sense to relinquish, and
that the regimes it underpins, while costly, have been a huge boon to American
hegemony. Will President Trump, in abrogating the very foundations of the
LIO, thus squander America’s unique positional advantages as global hegemon?
And—arguably more importantly—what were the underlying social conditions
that helped propel Trump to power? In the section below I seek to examine these
important questions. I argue that globalization has restructured the constellation
of winners and losers within the global economy, and that, to the extent that
globalization is equated with the LIO, the ‘success’ of globalization has weakened
US domestic support for the postwar international consensus.
43
Milanovic, Worlds apart, pp. 19–20.
44
Josh Bivens, Elise Gould, Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz, ‘Raising America’s pay: why it’s our central
economic policy challenge’, Economic Policy Institute, 4 June 2014, www.epi.org/publication/raising-americas-
pay/.
45
See e.g. Jonathan Haskel, Robert Z. Lawrence, Edward E. Leamer and Matthew J. Slaughter, ‘Globalization
and US wages: modifying classic theory to explain recent facts’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 26: 2, 2012, pp.
119–40. For a detailed examination of the growth of inequality within nations, see François Bourguignon and
Thomas Scott-Railton, The globalization of inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
46
Jon Huang, Samuel Jacoby, Michael Strickland and K. K. Rebecca Lai, ‘Election 2016: exit polls’, New York
Times, 8 Nov. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html?_
r=0. On the precariat, see Guy Standing, The precariat: the new dangerous class (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). For
a breakdown of voting patterns, see Nate Cohn, ‘A 2016 review: turnout wasn’t the driver of Clinton’s defeat’,
New York Times, 28 March 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/upshot/a-2016-review-turnout-
wasnt-the-driver-of-clintons-defeat.html.
47
Joel Kotkin, ‘The improbable demographics behind Donald Trump’s shocking presidential victory’, Forbes
Magazine, 9 Nov. 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2016/11/09/donald-trumps-presidenti-
victory-demographics/#15ee47993b96.
48
Trump quoted in Martin Wolf, ‘Donald Trump and Xi Jinping’s battle over globalisation’, Financial Times, 24
Jan. 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/74b42cd8-e171-11e6-8405-9e5580d6e5fb.
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Trump, American hegemony and the future of the liberal international order
contradictions and domestic costs this role often generates. Given the structure of
American capitalism sketched above, with its dominant multinational corpora-
tions, financial hegemony, high-tech sectors and huge preponderance in FDI, an
open global economy under US leadership, both to pacify geopolitical rivalry and
(minimally) partially to structure other states’ international preferences, continues
to make sense. Equally, however, globalization has contributed to hollowing out
the earning capacity of ordinary Americans and undermining traditional ‘blue-
collar’ jobs in the American economy. In the long economic boom following the
Second World War, Nitze’s dilemma was easier to manage; now, as the contradic-
tions within the American domestic economy grow, with a greater reliance on
credit and debt to shore up the earning capacity of American workers, the benefits
of American elites’ preferred global model, suited as it is to powerful sectors both
within the country and also globally, becomes a much harder sell to those who
feel acutely the economic costs to themselves and their families.
Compounding this domestic problem has been a weakening of consent for
American leadership internationally. During the Cold War, bipolarity offered
an agreed-upon Soviet ‘other’, which fostered the coherence of the LIO around
American leadership. Moreover, the existential threat was real, with American
hegemony solving collective action problems while also offering ‘club goods’ for
those in the US sphere of influence. As Aron presciently pointed out, ‘the strength
of a great power is diminished if it ceases to serve an idea’.49 In the post-Cold War
world, what is the ‘idea’ that provides the moral impetus for US leadership? We
have seen the fracturing of consensus occur in a number of ways. First, America’s
allies have frequently differed over their respective interpretations of what consti-
tute existential threats to their national security interests; this in turn has made it
difficult for the United States to build coalitions to serve its priorities and to fight
the kinds of wars it has embarked on since the end of the Cold War. It remains to
be seen how key institutions like NATO will respond to greater American reluc-
tance to engage, or even total indifference.
Adding to this mix is the fact that the UK, Europe’s pre-eminent military
power, is seeking to revise its relationship to the EU. This complicates US geopo-
litical interests in Europe, and while it is highly unlikely that London will seek
major revision of security arrangements, the prospect of British exit from the
EU places longstanding and crucial relationships in a state of flux and uncer-
tainty.50 Second, the rise of other powers, most notably China but also Russia,
may obstruct US action and raise both the costs of supporting US international
preferences and the costs of US action (or indeed inaction). Moreover, these
hegemonic challenges often look different from different geopolitical positions,
and rising powers have the capacity to generate incentives to pull other powers
into their own institutional orbits.51 The major hope of advocates of the LIO is
49
Raymond Aron, Peace and war: a theory of international relations (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1973), p. 280.
50
Julian Lindley-French, Little Britain?: Twenty-first century strategy for a middling European power (Plaat Van Uitgave
Niet Vastgesteld: In Eigen Beheer, 2015).
51
On geopolitical proximity and the enduring fixity of military power, see Patrick Porter, The global village myth:
distance, war and the limits of power (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015).
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Doug Stokes
that other states will seek to work within it, rather than taking on the immense
burden of seeking to revise it. However, while China is not seeking major global
systemic revision, its regional intentions are clear. Trump’s abandonment of the
TPP has added both to China’s growing self-confidence and to its capacity to build
Sino-centric institutions such as the ‘one belt, one road’ initiative. Its aspirations
also extend beyond its immediate east Asian neighbours, with major non-Asian
US allies joining its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Britain gave
the United States twenty-four hours’ notice of its intention to join in 2015, and
opened the door to other major powers such as Australia and South Korea. This
represented a ‘major affront’ to the United States, which saw the AIIB as a rival
to the World Bank.52 Indeed, in the face of Trump’s seeming abandonment of
globalization, Chinese President Xi Jinping stated that while some ‘people blame
economic globalization for the chaos in our world’, we ‘should not retreat into
the harbor whenever we encounter a storm or we will never reach the other shore
… No one will emerge as a winner from a trade war.’ In essence, Xi was staking
a claim for potential Chinese leadership of economic globalization (an extraordi-
nary development, but perhaps understandable given the data on some of the key
winners from globalization).53
In sum, the crisis in US leadership predates Trump, but his rise and the social
forces he managed to capture to win the presidency are rooted in the very successes
of the globalized model that US foreign policy elites have promoted in the
postwar world. This model has recalibrated the global economy and created new
winners, especially in Asia and among the top 1 per cent of earners in the West,
while creating a body of losers in the US domestic political economy that poses
a challenge to US foreign policy elites seeking to generate a domestic consensus
on American leadership. As Mandelbaum argued, ‘for the foreign-policy elite,
the need for American leadership in the world is a matter of settled conviction’.
He continued, however, that in the ‘general public the commitment to global
leadership is weaker … The politics of American foreign policy thus resembles
a firm in which the management—the foreign-policy elite—has to persuade
the shareholders—the public—to authorize expenditures.’54 To the extent that
the LIO has acted as midwife to neo-liberal globalization, and in the face of an
entirely rational rejection of that order by those who have been disenfranchised by
its promulgation, American leadership and American capacity to renew a global
consensus will become much harder to sustain.
Domestically, what of Trump’s commitment to ‘drain the swamp’ of special
interests and put ordinary Americans first? At the time of writing he has in fact
done the opposite. Nearly half—47 per cent—of his proposed US$6.2 trillion in
tax cuts will be enjoyed by the top 1 per cent of earners, amounting to additional
52
Ben Bland, ‘Trump jitters pull southeast Asia into China’s embrace’, Financial Times, 6 June 2017, https://www.
ft.com/content/680c7184-4aa3-11e7-919a-1e14ce4af89b. On the AIIB, see Jane Perlez, ‘China creates a World
Bank of its own, and the US balks’, New York Times, 4 Dec. 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/
business/international/china-creates-an-asian-bank-as-the-us-stands-aloof.html.
53
Xi Jinping quoted in Edward Luce, ‘The changing of the global economic guard’, The Atlantic, 29 Apr. 2017,
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/04/china-economy-populism/523989/.
54
Michael Mandelbaum, ‘The inadequacy of American power’, Foreign Affairs 81: 5, 2002, p. 67.
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Trump, American hegemony and the future of the liberal international order
income of almost US$3 trillion over a ten-year period.55 His financial reform
package seeks to undo the minimal Dodd–Frank reforms put in place by the
Obama administration to guard against the kinds of casino capitalism that led
to the Great Depression of 2008, while his repeal of Obama’s Affordable Care
Act would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, see 23 million Ameri-
cans lose access to health care by 2026.56 If we accept that there is a relation-
ship between greater income inequality in the United States, strongly linked to
the promotion of globalization by its elites, and a weakening of support for key
tenets of the LIO and America’s hegemonic role, then Trump’s presidency does
not augur well for the kinds of domestic stability necessary for resolute American
international leadership.
Conclusion
What can we conclude from the above analysis? This article has outlined a nascent
foreign policy world-view on the part of the Trump administration that combines
elements of isolationism with cost–benefit bilateralism and, most strongly of all,
a deep ambivalence towards the liberal international regimes that America has
helped bring to birth and sustain since the end of the Second World War. Drawing
on IR theory, I have argued that this process of order creation was undertaken
to reinforce American leadership, and that its positional advantages remain
considerable. Given that the benefits far outweigh the costs, the logic driving the
abrogation of these regimes is hard to discern. Globalization, while helping to lift
millions out of poverty, especially in Asia, has had a demonstrably negative impact
on workers in the West, particularly in the United States where social protections
are much weaker than in other areas. The so-called ‘American Dream’ worked
because it had at its heart a simple equation: work hard, do the right thing and
your children will enjoy a better life than you. It is clear that the social forces that
helped propel Trump into power feel that this dream has become more of a night-
mare in a country where huge wealth disparities are now seeing the richest Ameri-
cans living almost a generation longer than the poorest.57 This presents US elites
with a grave dilemma. How are they to reconcile the huge structural pressures
from leading sectors of the American economy to produce the kinds of interna-
tional order necessary to allow them to continue to profit with the demands of
a public increasingly hostile to the effects that this order helps produce? Trump’s
anti-globalization rhetoric has captured a popular and, from the standpoint of
55
Tony Nitti, ‘Trump’s “massive” middle-class tax cuts are tiny compared to those promised to the rich’, Forbes
Magazine, 3 March 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonynitti/2017/03/01/president-trump-promises-
massive-middle-class-tax-cuts-but-will-he-deliver/#40012f916b9e.
56
Alan Rappeport, ‘Bill to erase some Dodd–Frank banking rules passes in House’, New York Times, 8 June 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/business/dealbook/house-financial-regulations-dodd-frank.html. On
Trump’s health care reforms, see Congressional Budget Office, ‘H.R. 1628, American Health Care Act of
2017’, 24 May 2017, https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52752.
57
Raj Chetty, Michael Stepner, Sarah Abraham, Shelby Lin, Benjamin Scuderi, Nicholas Turner, Augustin
Bergeron and David Cutler, ‘The association between income and life expectancy in the United States, 2001–
2014’, Journal of the American Medical Association 315: 16, 2016, p. 1750.
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Doug Stokes
ordinary Americans, entirely rational mood, and in many ways the Trump admin-
istration is a strong case-study for the perennial social science problem of structure
and agency, a theme that I have developed throughout this article. Will the agency
of Trump, in seeking to reverse aspects of the LIO, overcome the deep structures
and well-trodden path dependencies of powerful sectors of American business and
elite opinion? It may be the case that Trump does so much damage to US prestige
that the United States loses the luxury of grand strategic choice and, as other
powers rise, sees its freedom of action becoming more tightly constrained. To
date, rival and contending ‘models’ for organizing interstate relations range from
the statist to the illiberal or highly sectarian. Imperfect as it is, the LIO is still the
‘best of a bad bunch’; but, to the extent that America remains its keystone state,
it needs to address long overdue and pressing problems that are undermining the
domestic order upon which its international leadership rests.
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